1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for managing computer resources in a distributed computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas in which progress has been made is in managing computer resources in a distributed computing system. Management products that manage computer resources are typically manually configured each time a resource is modified, that is, each time a resource is added to the managed environment, each time the resource's configuration is changed, or each time a resource is removed from the managed environment. Such manual configuration is time consuming, complex, and error prone. When a resource is introduced or modified in a managed environment a system administrator typically executes the following actions:                collects information about the modified resource;        installs agents that manage the specific resource type on the host containing the new resource;        runs a set of predefined management actions on the resource that include storing configuration information in a configuration management database, running a compliance check on the resource and installing any missing updates, monitoring the health of the resource, and monitoring any deviance of the configuration of the resource from an authorized configuration.        
The complexity and time involved in executing these management actions is exacerbated in a distributed computing environment where resources are created, changed, and removed at a faster rate than in other environments.